Network Video Recorders (NVRs) are known software systems that provide a centralized service to record, search, retrieve and manage digital video and audio data typically using commercial off-the-self computing platforms and traditional file-based storage systems. As those of skill in the art would understand, the video and audio data can be obtained from a variety of sources, such as members of a plurality of cameras or streamers. The cameras can be part of a regional, security monitoring system.
NVRs are limited by their computing platform's capacity to receive and transmit video and audio data, capacity to store in memory pre-event recorded video and audio data, capacity to communicate with storage systems, and the scalability of file-based storage systems. These limitations all contribute to a low density ratio of cameras to NVRs (tens of cameras to one NVR).
FIG. 1 illustrates a known system configuration. Audio and video from cameras or streamers are coupled, wired or wirelessly via a selected protocol, for example an internet (IP) protocol, to one of a plurality of NVRs. High-end security installations with 100s to 1000s of cameras require 10s to 100s of NVRs resulting in complex and expensive systems and a high cost of ownership.
One known solution, illustrated in FIG. 2, reduces some of the physical system cost by consolidating NVR platforms using virtualization to fewer high-end computing platforms. However, the number of hosted NVRs remains and does little to reduce the system management costs.
In another solution, illustrated in FIG. 3, IP Cameras communicate directly with “off-the-shelf” Storage Area Networks (SAN) via the Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) protocol to thereby try to eliminate the need for powerful NVR servers. However, these SANs only provide low-level block based storage and thus a dedicated file system will be required within each IP Camera making centralized data access and management complex and difficult to achieve. Additionally, systems as in FIG. 3 also retain complex SAN storage architectures that have proven to be difficult to manage.
Object based storage systems scale beyond traditional file based systems to 10s of Petabytes of capacity and billions of files as a single repository namespace that dramatically simplifies systems and their management. NVRs are, however, unable to fully exploit Object based storage systems as only the capacity of data storage is addressed. The need for powerful computing platforms still exists to perform their remaining functions and addressing the issues of systems management only produces limited improvement.